


firing blanks

by antimateriels



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Infidelity, Military Background, Other, a surprising amount of bureaucratic drudgery, ada wong as the unseen presence haunting everything in this fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-01-14 19:47:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18483154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antimateriels/pseuds/antimateriels
Summary: This isn’t a civilian marriage; you know that. You have the BSAA and he has the DSO. There are unpredictable deployments, long periods of separation, and interrupted vacations. There is misplaced anger and harsh words and haunting gazes and you understand. These are part of the package. But sometimes there’s the perfume of another woman, a flash of red in the periphery, and well.You didn’t sign up for that.





	1. July 2013, Lanshiang

YUENMON

Waiyip, Lanshiang, People’s Republic of China

July 2013

 

22:07

 

When you land in Lanshiang, the city is already burning. The fighting is mostly done. There are US government agents and USSTRATCOM assets on the ground, not to mention four out of five of the BSAA’s NA units. The UN hostages have already been rescued, but then they didn’t fly you in hot to deal with an issue. They’ve brought you here to clean it up.

First on your list is Redfield. But he’s currently locked in a debriefing room so you ask the sailor unfortunately tasked with aiding you during your stay to show you to your room.

Three pots of coffee later, two notepads, and one sizable cup of non-regulation alcoholic beverage later, you’re tired. Redfield’s even more tired, but he got a shower somewhere between then and now so you don’t have any pity for him. Before your sudden and absolute descent into the bureaucratic side of special ops, Chris was the closest thing you had to a partner. BSAA Special Operations Agents work solo in practice, but you’re both ex-military and teamwork comes easily enough. They’ve given you the XO’s room to try and sort through the paper mountains Lanshiang has generated. It’s a nice room by ship standards but Chris looks uncomfortable and cramped in his seat across from you, like a dog in a kennel two sizes too small. He thumbs a stack of medical release forms.

“Jesus, where do they get all this paper?”

“Supply has the best-balanced book in this whole org,” you say absently as you scribble down your approval and authorization. One scribble for blood samples to be drawn and tissue samples to be taken, which is the politically correct way to say “desiccation of a corpse”. Another to order cremation of remains and still another to authorize the repatriation of those ashes to their home countries. You’re glad you already finished the ones for the BSAA personnel already. They’re almost routine by now for you, but Redfield might just snap if he has to sign off on the desiccation and repatriation of Alpha team. It’s unspoken that he’s here not so much as the group captain, not so much to help you, but rather for you to keep him steady and grounded.

The last thing the BSAA needs right now is for their golden boy to go flying off the handle into another trauma-fueled, alcohol-filled bender.

You finish the file and close it. The manila folder is thick. Not as thick as it could be, but too thick to really say this was a job well done. Most of the UN hostages have been safely extracted, but Lanshiang is fucked up. “Bravo is cleaning up the north sector, and the PLA are ready to receive the corpses. They’re gonna handle their dead.”

You can hear him blink. Slow and drawn out, like a man coming back to himself. Chris is out of his LBV. He’s in the standard BSAA grey fatigues, with only a hand gun holster and a knife visible, in what is an almost disarming picture. Normally Redfield’s geared to the teeth. His hands seem to curl unconsciously around a gun barrel that isn’t there. You understand. Unspoken is the knowledge that the PLA is going to do all sorts of shit with those bodies and it’s all going to end up back on the BSAA’s plate sooner or later. Probably as some sort of souped up bioweapon Chris will have to shoot. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to shoot it too.

“That leaves us with,” and he stops there again biting the words off in his mouth. But he continues unprompted this time, because you were partners for almost nine years, because, he never forgets where you came from before this. Army Infantry, Air Assault, Ranger qualified. You’d rather bite the bullet than sit around beating bushes. That’s a game for spooks, and you’re both soldiers. “Neo-Umbrella, and whoever is behind them.”

And he still gets points for trying to walk around the elephant in the room, but Ada isn’t just a relationship problem. She’s a _problem_ problem. One that you have to address. One that you can’t help but feel would have been solved with a bullet square between her eyes.

You click your pen, once, twice in an obvious tell. “Ada Wong is dead.”

Chris doesn’t flinch but he does give you this very tired, very searching look; in parts pitying and apologetic. He knows too, that some problems are solved best by bullets. The only question is why he didn’t do just that the first time. If you had Piers’ report, you’d know how the standoff went because it’d be there in his neat handwriting. A second account, as it were.

But you only have Chris and Chris looks at you and you don’t even need him to say it. You know. Still, you sort through your papers until you find his report. When you pick it up, Chris straightens in the chair and sets his hands on his knees. You aren’t friends in that moment. You’re soldiers again and this is suddenly a debrief. Chris recounts events since he landed in Lanshiang with BSAA NA’s Alpha and Bravo teams. There are no comforting pats and you pretend not to see his hands tremble when he tells you how Reid, Jeff, and Marco died. You annotate the whole way through and do not pause until the almost-capture of Ada Wong.

In his defense, he doesn’t stop there. You do. You place your pen down. Your hand doesn’t shake, your breathing is steady, but you close your eyes. It’s Leon. Of course, it is. Chris backs down for very few people and Ada had blown his squad to kingdom come. Nothing short of Leon or Claire could have stayed his hand.

You tap your pen against your lip and then you put it down and sigh. “Not to prove Intel right in their opinion of us as dimwits, but I still think a bullet would have ended this before it blew up.”

This gets you the hint of a laugh. “You’ve been out from the field too long to think like an infantry grunt anymore Ranger.” Chris looks good when he’s laughing – as if he hadn’t come straight out of an combat zone, as if he hadn’t been pulled from the wreckage of a truly impressive emotional breakdown before that.

From him _Ranger_ sounds teasing. Piers had said it full of admiration, but Chris says it like a fond nickname. As if it’s an endearment and not a classification. It's who you are: a graduate of Ranger school, and former army special forces before the BSAA had come in and scooped you up. You wonder if that reminds him of Piers. Or if Piers had reminded him of you.

“And she did catch a bullet later.” _Not mine_ , goes unspoken and you know that if it were up to Chris, he wouldn’t have shot her. No, he’d have kept his promise to Leon. He’d have been better than what he was hours before. He would have brought her into custody and handed her over to the relevant authorities. You can’t help but wonder if it were you, would you make the same decision? Would you be able to?

You think of Alpha team infected and turned. You think of Delta team lost in the chaos of Tatchi. Technically, Piers infected himself, but you think of him too and the injector filled with C-Virus detailed in Chris’ report. You think of-

\- of Leon, and how sometimes he smelled like more than just alcohol coming back from missions he couldn’t talk about. Of how Hunnigan had stuttered over the name once and shut down as if she’s said something she shouldn’t have.

You’ve never met this Ada Wong. She crossed into the BSAA’s sights officially two years ago after the Eastern Slav Civil War for all of a moment before promptly vanishing. After her Interpol warrant had also vanished, you’d spent a good two weeks in the archives and come away only with “woman in red” and “spy” and “Ada Wong”. A woman with her fingers in a lot of pies, and the occupier of second place on the BSAA’s most wanted list. A complete mystery. A stranger. The enemy.

“Dead,” you say again.

“Dead.” Chris confirms. And then he leans forward and he’s rubbing the back of your hand comforting and supportive. His voice is softer now. “I told Leon already,” he says as if this is what you’re thinking of.

You would have shot her. For Alpha team twice over, for fucking with your boys, and for fucking your husband. You would have shot her and, at the end of the day, if it was you sitting in that debriefing room, you wouldn’t be able to say it was 100% for the job.

Well. Maybe this is why you’re a desk jockey right now. You thank Chris and he draws his hand back momentarily assured you’re okay. You continue to listen to his recount and only pause at the very end where he stumbles over Piers’ fate. He tries a few times to pick it up but finally settles on stony silence.

“Go to sleep Redfield.” You say finally, “I’ve heard more than enough.” And this time it is your turn to reach across the desk and put your hand on his. “He made his choice and he’s not wishy-washy like the chairforce. You couldn’t have stopped him.”

Normally Chris would snark back, but he doesn’t. He looks so tired that you can feel it in your bones. He gives you a nod and then stumbles out of the room and into a dark bunk and, hopefully, oblivion.

 

 

YUENMON

Waiyip, Lanshiang, People’s Republic of China

July 2013

 

13:49

 

It’s a bright sunny day, and as you stand on the dock in the shadow of the carrier you can’t help but feel that this city would have been beautiful. It’s a common enough sentiment that you’re duly surprised it still registers. But no, it seems the death and destruction and straight up gore generated in the wake of a bioweapons attack still fills you with regret. Regret for what was lost. Regret for what could have been done.

In conclusion, Lanshiang wasn’t your mission but it _should_ have been. If it were maybe it wouldn’t be such a fuck up. Maybe the BSAA wouldn’t be down two and a half squadrons, maybe Nivans wouldn’t be dead, maybe Tatchi wouldn’t have been engulfed in the C-Virus. Maybe you wouldn’t be considering divorce.

There’s the steady rattle of what can only be standard issue boots somewhere close to the top of your head. When you look up you find a bleary-eyed soldier starring back. Chris has eyebags seven days deep and the look he gives you is enough for you to forgive him for the six months after Edonia. Which, if Piers were still alive, he’d tell anyone willing to listen, was nothing short of a miracle. A miracle. Nothing short of a miracle. Ranger, forgiving? Hah!

Of course, Piers is dead. Reason number one for Redfield’s eyebags. Followed shortly by the ridiculous parade of debriefs he must have just walked out of, the fact he’d been fished out of an escape pod not even twenty-six hours ago, and the death and destruction that still smolder from across the harbor. He walks down and comes to stand next to you, slumping visibly once he’s in the shade. The July sun is unrelenting and the light that reflects off the skyscrapers of Tatchi is almost blinding. Since neither of you have sunglasses all you can do is hide in the shade and squint at the sun.

Death and destruction and bureaucracy. These are nothing new. But the look in his eyes is enough to make you immediately, instinctively forgive him for fucking off after the mess of Edonia. Enough to make you forgive for all the hours you’d spent tracking him instead of sleeping. You forgive him even for the three days you spent scouring second-hand reports over what was supposedly a vacation in the Canadian Rockies. Chris looks like he’s going to die if he doesn’t spit out whatever words are sitting in his stomach, and at the same time he looks like the telling will kill him too.

“Look,” and he runs his hand through his hair. It’s not exactly a nervous tic, but in all the time you’ve known Redfield, he’s never followed up that motion with something you want to hear. You don’t expect him to start now so you lean down and pick up your coffee cup. It’s almost empty. “Look,” he says again and then immediately cuts himself off and sighs. You offer him the dregs of your cup and he wordlessly downs it all.

Finally, he says: “You’ve read Delta’s reports.”

It’s not a question.

It’s rhetorical. Of course, you have. They flew you in hot from Africa to read those reports. After Chris’ private debrief yesterday, you spent the entire night getting intimately familiar with those reports among others. Reading reports; it’s what you do now. The brass doesn’t like you running around shooting things too much these days especially since USSTRATCOMM and DSO have your name. They always come running to you willy-nilly and the BSAA – the fucking traitorous bastards that they are – are only too happy to throw you into the bureaucratic black hole that follows those organizations around.

“Look,” Chris says for the third time in just as many minutes, “Leon, he-“

Ah. Yes. Leon. Your supposedly-dead husband. Which, to be honest, you’d half felt was a smokescreen when you received the government’s condolences in a neat manila folder. It isn’t exactly the first time he’s pulled that card and you have the beginnings of a small collection of condolence letters. Leon’s a bit of a one-trick pony when it comes to undercover activities in the way that bellies his police academy start and his not-exactly military training since. But this time it’d come two days after the city of Tall Oaks effectively ceased to exist. 70,000 lives gone in one go, president and DSO escorts among them. So maybe you hadn’t really believed Leon was dead, but then maybe it also stuck more than before.

If Leon’s relative well-being was the only sucker punch waiting in Delta’s reports then you wouldn’t be here woolgathering. And you think, Chris wouldn’t be here either, hiding in the shade the carrier’s shadow provides, trying to walk through the minefield that is currently your marriage. Redfield isn’t subtle. He doesn’t do delicate. He’s 100kg of solid muscle and stupid stubbornness; currently, 100kg of tired and overstretched muscle, but he’s here under the blazing sun instead of in a dark bunk. Or a seedy eastern-European bar (which you have forgiven him for, mostly, anyways).

“- he doesn’t think when it comes to Ada. Never has. Okay?”

You blink into the sun once. It doesn’t hurt. It hadn’t hurt even when you’d seen it spelled out plainly in black ink the first time either. There’s no sharp edge, no tearing flesh. There’s no shrapnel to rip out of bodies. There is no sharp, white-hot burn of a knife straight to the thigh. It hurts in the same far-off way that staring at Lanshiang hurts. Dull, aching, vaguely throbbing in time to your resting heart-beat. It’s a hurt that you’ve felt too many times before; it’s an old hurt. A familiar one. You blink again, “okay,” you say without any change in inflection at all, as if you’re commenting on the weather or something equally mundane.

Redfield isn’t subtle, and delicate isn’t within his abilities, but he’s worked with you for almost nine years and he knows what the lack of reaction means. He scrubs at the back of his neck futilely and gives the bottom of the coffee cup a disapproving glare. You know what he’s thinking: If it was full, he could be drinking coffee and spared from talking.

“Shit, look, it doesn’t mean anything. Don’t overthink it. You know him; you’re married to him-”

Chris doesn’t do subtle, and he doesn’t do delicate, but he gets points for trying. Enough points to wipe out the utter betrayal and disappointment his vanishing act after Edonia. Mostly, anyways. Not that you’re going to tally them in the wake of Pier’s death and the current crisis. Instead, you roll your shoulders and crack your neck. You turn on your heel and off Chris a quirk of the lips that might be called a smile in other circumstances.

“You owe me a coffee.”

Chris raises an eyebrow and looks pointedly at the shitty styrofoam cup in his hands, incredulous and also immensely relieved to be offered an exit to this conversation. “This barely counts as drinkable, let alone coffee.”

You laugh despite yourself. Death, destruction, betrayal, and bureaucracy.

The woman in red and Leon S. Kenney. It’d be nice if these were new things, but they’re old hurts. Familiar, even.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote a time-line for this fic to keep things straight in my head... God damn the Biohazard franchise and their need for hard dates and timelines.
> 
> Anyways, I'd like to promise that Chris and the main character's relationship is platonic (and it is here, up to this point!) but, I have to be honest. Everyone gets to make shitty decisions on this ride.


	2. August 2013, Washington D.C.

A CERTAIN APARTMENT BLOCK

Washington D.C., United States of America

July 2013

 

00:56

 

It takes a full three weeks to get Lanshiang’s paper work cleaned up enough to hand off to the PLA. There’s more to be done, but you leave that in the hands of Lan Zhu and Noel. Bravo NA is staying behind to help with final clean-up at your behest, and though you feel for the squad and their sudden loss of leave, you know they’re the best. Though this matters a lot less in the grand scheme of things because they are also the only option. Despite all the shit Ada had said, she’d been right about the life expectancy of Chris’ squads. Alpha was decimated (again) and the incident at Tatchi had crippled Delta. Charlie and Echo had a pressing mission in the US that couldn’t be postponed. The European and African divisions are leaving teams behind too, though their losses really aren’t any lesser. The Asian division will take at least five years to recover, but at least recovery was on the table. Building a division from the ground up wasn’t something to blink at. Thankfully that’s in the hands of Lan Zhu who has been a desk jockey for the better part of ten years. It helps that he speaks seven Asiatic languages and has connections all over the place. The BSAA'll need those when it tries to pry SOF-level soldiers out of their respective armies.

Last night, Lan had given you this half-dead stare and a small wave of his hand that meant roughly _“I have this under control”._ So, you’re happy to hop onto Charlie’s transport the next morning. Redfield is there too, headed to Europe to support a mission there in HQ’s not-so-subtle stress test. Edonia isn’t exactly at the rebuilding stage yet, which is the bureaucratic way of saying there are still rogue BOWs running around that need to be put down. And there’s this interesting lead about Wesker’s son which is an extremely unsubtle way of asking if Redfield can reign in his temper and play nice. The BSAA is a _peacekeeping_ force at the end of the day.

It’s a cloudy day in Ramstein, but Chris' new unit is waiting on the tarmac for him so you both part without so much as a word. Redfield doesn’t do farewells any more than he does delicacy. And you’re a soldier same as him. There’s no need for goodbyes. You’ll see each other soon again, all in due time. But first, a break. A trip back home.

Charlie and Echo and you share the belly of an USAF C-130 Hercules with about four humvees and twenty stacks of miscellaneous crates. Redfield had been a solid and silent weight at your side on the ride over Asia. But Charlie lead spends the entire trans-Atlantic trip telling you the details of their directive to Tall Oaks and all you can think about is Ada fucking Wong. Or, perhaps, Ada Wong fucking –

Tall Oaks is another mission that perhaps should have been yours. In hindsight, preventing it would have been impossible given how the then-National Security Advisor had been stonewalling all BSAA efforts in the continental USA, but the clean-up mission; that should have been yours. Some missions require finesse and control. Missions like Tall Oaks require firepower. Indiscriminate firepower. You should be memorizing maps and scrutinizing reports, lacing up boots and filling spare magazines, double checking that everyone on the strike team knows how to call in the air support.

But you’re not, because you’re due a vacation. A period of rest after nine months of grueling back to back missions ranging from actual deployment to bureaucratic slavery. Everyone has a breaking point as so concisely demonstrated by the BSAA’s own golden boy exactly seven months ago (which you forgive him for, really). Before Lanshiang, you’d been looking forward to it. It feels like ages since you’ve actually been back in a bed you could call your own and there had been the faint promise that, barring any emergencies, your husband would be there too. It wasn’t like you hadn’t seen Leon between Edonia and Lanshiang, but they’d been stolen moments in the crossroads of missions, slivers of time eked out from the demands of your respective jobs. The vacation before this – a brief retreat to the Canadian Rockies – had been derailed first by a BSAA emergency, and then a presidential one.

But now, you’re uneasy. Dreading it? No, you still miss your bed and it’ll be good to sleep in it again after so long away. The road from Joint Base Andrews to the apartment is as long as you remember. You stare out the window of the taxi and watch as the lights reflect in the Potomac as you speed past. It’ll be good to see Leon too, you think. You miss him. You turn this thought over three times in your mind and it settles heavily in your stomach so you know it’s true. You miss him, you do. You just aren’t quite sure what to say to him. The taxi stops at a red light and the glare fills the entire car with red. You try not to think of Ada Wong who is dead, who Leon saved, who you know for a fact he loved. Still loves? You twist your wedding band and wonder if this is an uncharitable train of thought. She’s dead after all. And he’d married you which counted for something. Should count for something. Deciding that it is, in fact, uncharitable, you put it down and watch downtown D.C. pass in a blur of lights and shadows.

Leon and Harper left Lanshiang just a few hours after you’d arrived. They should both be back Stateside by now, tucked into their homes or their beds. You expect the house to be dark and for Leon to be asleep. Or maybe, awake. He’s always had a bit of trouble with time zones and jetlag. Another reminder of his extremely not-military training. A soldier can sleep anywhere, anytime, you’d teased countless times before. And Leon would say, ‘yeah? What does that make me?’ and you can almost hear it. Yeah, you think, yeah it would be great to see Leon again.

But there’s no one home. Leon’s shoes aren’t even in the rack. In fact, it doesn’t look like he’s returned yet at all. This doesn’t surprise you. You can’t tell if this is because you expected to be disappointed or if you’re numb to these kinds of things. He should be here, but he isn’t.

You flick the lights on and stand alone in an apartment that feels too big. You wonder if this is still your home.

 

 

A CERTAIN APARTMENT BLOCK

Washington D.C, United States of America

July 2011

 

01:43

 

It’s almost two in the morning by the time you make it back home from Andrews. You could have skipped the commute and stayed on base, but Leon’s apartment is nearby and it has a fully functioning shower which in and of itself is a motivating factor. Your husband should be another, but he’s on vacation somewhere in the Rockies. Or Portugal. Hunnigan tries her best to grab your schedule from the BSAA and match up your deployments to Leon’s missions, but your schedule is an ever-changing thing.

You plan on spending the first hours of vacation in Leon’s shower. It has hot water! That isn’t limited! And a full stall! With a curtain! It’s a luxury beyond imagination for someone whose just spent the past 4 months on a floating tin-can mistakenly labeled a ship.

You let these dreams of grandeur carry you into the apartment, past the mudroom where you deposit unspeakably dirtied boots and outerwear, and into the kitchen. You’re about half shucked out of a tank-top that was once white when you realize you are, in fact, not alone.

Leon wolf whistles, and when you turn and visibly startle, he laughs. It’s warm and low, like he’s been sunning all day and drinking whiskey. He’s got the semi-permanent five o’clock shadow that you’ll die before admitting is charming and he’s holding a tumbler of what is obviously liquor.

“I thought you were on vacation,” you say dumbly.

“I thought I was too.” And he’s smiling that smile of his, genuine and amused and languid and – _charming_. Unspeakably so. Or maybe you’ve just lost some immunity because it’s been so long since you’ve seen it. And him. God, it’s been so long.

The duffel bag is dropped unceremoniously on the ground, to be dealt with later. You’re too tired to pull off anything seductive or attractive, and you sincerely hope Leon doesn’t mind the smell or the grime as you lean over the counter and press a kiss to his cheeks.

It’s quick and not at all enough, but you needed a shower three weeks ago. When you pull back, you take his tumbler with you and take a sip. Leon has this thing when it comes to alcohol. He’s such a creature of habit and you’d learned early on which drinks he paired with which mood. Pattern-recognition is a skill that’s been beaten into your bones.

It’s white liquor, which really only has bad connotations. Rum when he’s tired. Vodka when things have gone to shit. Chinese liqueur when he’s reminiscing.

Vodka today. Hm.

“Bad day?” You ask.

You expect him to say ‘bad week’ or ‘bad month’ or even ‘bad life’ in his usual way, but he doesn’t. He gives you that smile again and it is going straight to your head because you feel warm, and hot in your belly and your face.

Leon, who has never had a sense of self-preservation, leans back across the counter and cups your grimy cheek. He kisses you long and deep; not enough that you can't breathe, but enough for you to draw back and immediately take a breath.

“Better now,” he says.

Three years ago, you thought you’d break your heart over that cocky slip of teeth. But here you are years on, and married, and for some people home is a place. But this, Leon’s self-satisfied smile and the way he takes his glass back and brushes his fingers against yours unnecessarily, this, more than his shower that has actual water pressure and unlimited hot water, soothes you. It settles you. Weight falls from your shoulders and you want to lean back into his hand and purr or something else disgustingly domestic. But you don’t because you really, really need a shower. Leon’s been a gentleman for not even wrinkling his nose, but that doesn’t mean you don’t stink.

“Tell me after my shower.”

His only response is a laugh and it follows after you and runs warm down your spine. It feels like home.

 

 

THE PENTAGON

Arlington, Virginia, United States of America

August, 2013

 

11:47

 

Three days ago, at the BSAA NA HQ, a relatively young POG brought you a cup of coffee and asked you what it was like to be married to someone on the government side of things. She’s a US citizen, and she’s fairly new to the whole BSAA thing. Her fiancé is in the DSO. Logistics, to be sure, but then Logistics is what is technically written on Leon’s business cards too.

Something about her must have tugged at your heart because you don’t tell her to bugger off. You stare into the depths of your coffee – black as hell, there’s no milk in the fridge goddamnit – and you tell her that it’s hard. That it’s an unending string of compromises. It's a lot of hard work that sometimes feels like it's all for nothing. She smiles back at you and says she understands. She’ll make it work.

This, you think, more than anything else betrays her youth. But then, maybe her fiancé really is a logistics POG and not an unacknowledged USSTRATCOM asset who will spend 297 out of 365 outside of the country. And well, she’s BSAA, but you doubt she’s going to see much outside of the NA headquarters. Maybe at the end of the day, both of them will go home to a house they share and do domestic things like cook dinner together and talk about their days as if work was something that ended when you left the office.

You wonder why you think of her right now, here, in the Pentagon attending a Top Secret briefing on the most recent bioweapons intel. Someone’s weaponized the plaga as if they weren’t bad enough already. Made them more virulent, which is bad, and sturdier, which is worse, and made them _tame_. This is the worst. The nature of bioweapons is that they are indiscriminate. Choosing to use one is the modern-day equivalent of razing the fields and sowing them with salt. Being able to direct their destruction takes away this inherent flaw and makes them three times more attractive as weapons. It means you're going to be seeing a lot of plaga soon.

Analysts are scribbling down notes, asking where the new strain came from even as the speaker continues on to detail the dominant/submissive divide and the nature of this new form of plaga. You zone out his genetic charts and analysis. He makes an analogy to queen bees and their drones and something clicks into place.

The base of this new weapon is from the Eastern Slav Republic, you know instantly, and again, a memory rises to the surface. “Bee-keeper” and –

“How old is this intel?” You ask as you flatten your fist over your briefing folder. Five fingers spread out, inhale, count to five, exhale, feel the solid of the mahogany table beneath it. Don’t draw conclusions, don’t draw conclusions. You close your eyes. Open them.

The man in the smart suit – DSO? CIA? FBI? certainly not military, if he were military he’d be wearing an unmarked uniform and you’d know – clears his throat. This is sensitive information, but the meeting is already Top Secret clearance and everyone here is need to know only. He’s only posturing. “Yesterday,” he says, “we received this information yesterday from a reliable agent, the best we have. It’s the real deal.”

DSO, you think. There’s something of him that smacks of Hunnigan, something of his manner that reminds you of the rear support officers who sit in dark rooms filled with screens pouring over camera feeds and belting out orders without regard to rank. No need to care about rank when all your directives came straight from the President. And he’s getting intel straight from the mouth of the Division of Security Operations’ best and most reliable agent? Well, that explains where Leon’s gone. That explains a lot. The pieces are falling into place faster than you can think.

Are your teeth grinding together? Can the other people here it? You’re the second-most senior BSAA representative at this table and you really don’t want to lash out and smash your fist into the table. It would set a bad example. But. Your temper is wearing thin, the infantry grunt in you tired of being led in a circle by arrogant POGs. You _know_.

You know who the source is.

At Lanshiang, Chris had sat across from you and recounted how she’d been shot by someone else four times, and how she’d fallen, at least 70 feet to the deck of a PLA carrier loaded with C-Virus missiles. He’d looked at you solemnly and told you that she was dead. One week ago, standing on the side of Ramstein’s airfield watching twelve humvees being loaded onto planes, you'd called Leon. It went to voicemail, something to be expected, and you’d said sorry. Sorry for your loss, sorry, I know how much she means to you. And unsaid, in the silence between condolences, I’m here for you. I'm here.

He was supposed to be back before you. There was a layer of dust on the counter that said he’d never even come home. In 2011, someone wiped out Ada Wong’s Interpol warrants. They’d simply just vanished. Two days later, Leon came home and when you kissed him you could taste the whisky on his tongue and something else, sharp and smooth and cool.

“Who is the source?” You force yourself to enunciate every word clearly. It’s a habit that keeps you from spitting in anger. “Are they even trustworthy? Can you vouch for them?”

“Our source cannot be named.” Like the pompous, puffed-up POG that he is, he takes a pause for levity. “I trust the data that’s been gathered. Make no mistake: these plaga are real, and we are going to have to deal with them sooner or later. I’d prefer sooner.”

Great, that’s fine. And the BSAA cannot cooperate in this, cannot allocate resources and lives to this endeavor if the “source” cannot be confirmed to be actually trustworthy which everyone in this goddamn room knows they aren’t. There are other words on the tip of your tongue: your agent’s been compromised, he doesn’t think straight when Ada’s involved, he pointed a gun at Redfield for her.

Ten years ago, a long time before you thought you’d break your heart over a cocky slip of teeth, your commander had recommended you to Ranger school. “It’ll make or break you,” he’d said. And like the young bright-eyed soldier you’d been, you’d asked if he had any advice. He’d looked at you and there was calculation there but understanding too. He said: “Think with your head, not your heart.”

Your heart says: She was dead and Leon let you think she was dead, let you say that you were sorry for his loss, let you worry and sympathize with him over a woman that he knew was alive. He could have told you at any time and he chose not to. That’s betrayal, plain and simple. And if it were just a tryst, you could forgive that, but this is betrayal because she’s the enemy.

Your head says: I understand.

Here’s the thing about compromise which you didn’t tell the young bright-eyed POG: it means cutting something loose. It means choosing one thing over another, one directive over another, one person over another. It means making a choice.

You understand what choice has been made. It’s the same one Leon makes time and time again. Every time he looks at the array of options laid out in front of him, he chooses to cut the same one loose every time. Nothing can slacken your posture, it’s still ramrod-army-straight, but you feel like someone’s taken a scissor to the rope holding you up. You’re in free-fall.

 

BSAA BARRACKS

Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, United States of America

August 2013, one day later

 

14:23

 

“Let me in.”

Chris stares at you. His eyes trail down your body slower than a once-over should take as if he is carefully weighing the situation. He takes in the duffel bag over your shoulder, your left-hand sans ring, the aggressive tilt of your shoulders. He looks over the top of your head and surely sees the BSAA jeep wrangler, license plate DC. The military teaches not to jump to conclusions. To look at the situation and take it in objectively. Break it down into understandable pieces.

He moves so his back is against his door and there’s room for you to pass through.

Chris does not ask any questions. He does not say anything. There’s black mold growing in the corners of the white-washed barracks. There’s black-mold growing in your heart too, you think. Maybe it’s been there from the very beginning. Hadn’t Chris said that too, at the start, when you’d told him about the handsome agent working with you at USSTRATCOM? What had he said then? _I don’t know if you know what you’re getting into._

You cut through his apartment and kick off your shoes. You drop your duffel and throw your coat over the arm of his sofa. Chris has walked three steps behind you the entire time as if aware that you’re nothing more than a tight coil of anger ready to snap at the slightest provocation.

He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized my location/date schtick worked pretty well in the first chapter, and not at all in this chapter where the sections run across times and places but for the sake of my need for structural coherency, please indulge me.
> 
> Weird Military Acronyms:  
> PLA = People's Liberation Army, aka the Chinese Military  
> POG = Person Other than Grunt, "back line" support professions like cooks and logistics and finance and whatnot.
> 
> From the previous chapter which I probably should have noted:  
> XO = Executive Officer  
> LBV = Load Bearing Vest  
> Chairforce = derogatory nickname for the US Airforce


	3. August 2013, Ft. Bragg NC

A CERTAIN APARTMENT BLOCK

Washington D.C, United States of America

July 29th, 2013

 

09:01

 

Everything you own is packed up in the boxes assembled in the kitchen. Altogether, it’s less than you thought it would be. It should hurt, you think, to see your life with Leon packed up into less than 10 boxes. But few things hurt anymore, and it makes sense in a certain way. You spend half your time in London at BSAA headquarters and the other half traipsing around the world shooting things or wrestling paperwork.

This apartment that Leon shares with you is a part of your life because you’ve made room for it. You wrestled the time from the jaws of your job because it was important. It’s important to wind-down and take a breather. You know, because medical has been blasting mental health reminders for seven months straight after BSAA golden boy Chris Redfield decided to AWOL in Edonia. And you know too through experience, how hearing Leon’s laugh made you feel warm in the way even the South African sun didn’t. How you’d wake up in a bed you could call your own and feel like you’d slept a hundred years, well-rested for once and ready to take on the world. You remember waking up in the morning and reaching not for a report or the radio, but for Leon’s dirty blond hair. It’s the closest thing to peace you’ve ever felt.

The thing is, sometimes you forget what life is like for civilians. It’s easier to remember when you’re watching Leon flipping slightly burnt pancakes. Or, when sometimes you two are doing the day’s dishes and he’ll splash you and it’s like you’re kids again. All thoughts of guns and BOWs and missions melting away in a spray of soapy water. Leon laughs and it runs warm down your spine and you remember that there’s a life outside of war. There are people who fight for that life, to protect the people who live that kind of life. You’re not one of them, but Leon is. You know that if it came down to the mission or an innocent, Leon would pick the innocent every single time.

That life feels far away now. It’s all packed up into cardboard boxes. Someone’s loading them onto a truck which will take them to a terminal and it’ll all be packed onto an ocean container. They’ll take a month to cross the Atlantic before ending up at your flat in London. You wonder if you’ll even open them.

You have a life in London too, and the BSAA occupies it in its entirety.  

 

BSAA EASTERN EUROPEAN OUTPOST

Unnamed City, The Republic of Edonia

December, 2012

 

18:10

 

Alpha team, or rather what’s left of Alpha, or rather Piers Nivans comes limping into the command tent with a scowl as heavy as the Dolomites shadowing his face. He slams something small and metallic down on your map table. He’s a lit fuse, already angry and red in the face. You raise an eyebrow.

“The captain-” is about all he manages because his mouth closes in on itself. You reach for your mug because nothing involving the words “captain” or “Redfield” have given you anything less than a headache in the past 48 hours. Piers is torn between saying something extremely unkind and critical about his commanding officer and saying nothing at all. You can see _something_ war against the rigid loyalty and adherence to chain of command the Army had beaten into him. Something wins, and you think it’s the love he has for Chris because all the anger has bled out of his voice. He sounds worried, tired, disappointed when he speaks again, smaller than any soldier has any right to be. “The captain’s gone.”

Piers lifts his hand and reveals the metallic object. It’s Redfield’s dog tags.

“Okay,” you say because, okay. Okay, you can deal with this.

You have to.

You don’t dwell on what it means – there’s no time for that. You order Nivans back to medical and then radio medical and tell them not to let him do anything stupid. That’s tacit permission to tie him down or drug him up; at this point in time you don’t really have a preference. Then you scrape together a perfunctory search party from your available resources. They won’t find Chris partly because you have no resources available at the moment, and partly because Chris knows exactly what he’s doing.

He’s gone. He’s left, by choice.

Redfield was the sort of man who collected dog tags. If anyone on his team fell in combat, or if they died on a medical operating table, he would collect the dog tags and wipe them clean himself. The families deserved something solid. That’s what he said. He’d called them a symbol. More than the uniform or the fatigues, a dog tag marked a soldier.

He took them off. He left them behind. He’s leaving a message: he’s done. He’s out.

Alpha team is dead. Slaughtered down to two men by some sort of bioweapon wielding agent no one can find but who bears a surprising resemblance to the same agent whose Interpol warrants were scrubbed into nonexistence. Edonia is burning. There’s three ogroman sightings and you don’t have half the firepower you need. You haven’t slept in two days. Piers has a compound fracture in his arm that has an 87.56% of healing cleanly provided he rests. The coffee tastes like dirt. You’ve fielded thirteen medivac requests in the past 36 hours. Redfield just up and left in the middle of a war and –

The situation at hand is all a bit of a shit-show and that’s without taking into account everything happening behind the curtain of the civil-war. Interagency conflict which results in the US sticking their fingers into BSAA missions. Extrajudicial kidnapping of Edonian citizens. Corporations and countries and special interest groups with their super special agents who sell bioweapons to extremists and fuck married men. But it’s okay. You’re okay. You can deal with this. It’s not like Redfield’s left you any choice.

 

BSAA NA FORWARD OPERATING BASE

Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, United States of America

August 2013

 

15:57

 

When you were in boot, the sergeant had given a very loud and slightly impassioned speech about how his newly minted soldiers should really not marry the first pretty thing to cross their paths. He’d implored your cohort to think with theirs heads, however empty they were, and not their dicks. This was shortly followed by a curt reminder that fraternization was bad for morale and bad for unit cohesion. Do not fuck your fellow soldiers, was the message, especially not the ones you have to fight besides. He had to have known that none of you were listening considering cadets were constantly caught fucking each other in the bathrooms.

When you were in the army, on your first deployment, you and your entire fireteam had caught the company captain snogging the platoon sergeant which had tanked morale faster than a crate of veggie omelet MREs, resulted in the quickest reassignment you’d ever witnessed to date, and really sort of hammered home how important it was not to fuck your squad mates.

You’d like to say it’s a lesson you’ve kept close to your heart. Even in mountain phase of ranger school, or on that one subarctic mission, or in the bone-cold desert nights, the closest you’d ever come to breaking that tenet was pressing your body against someone else’s for warmth. It takes you three years to understand the underlying reasons for anti-fraternization rules. It’s not so much about the sex. It’s about keeping the emotions in control, staying focused on the mission objectives with no distractions or compromises.

It isn’t distraction that drives you to kiss him. It isn’t compromise either. It’s a choice – and anger, and frustration, and the boiling point of frustration; but choice. It’s a choice. Chris is solid, hot. Heavy. His hand is rough and calloused in the same way your hands are. You want to break his skin and taste blood and know that it’s the same blood that is inside you. Chris is a soldier, even if he chose to leave the air force, he also chose to come back. Every time he draws his gun he is prepared to kill. There is no 0.5 second delay, no question of what the target is, only where it is. When you kiss him with teeth and scrape his lips, he kisses back, which is both unexpected and encouraging.

Chris’ hand clenches around your forearm and it is tighter than Leon’s grasp had ever been. Chris’ knee is shoved between your thighs and when you grind down, he doesn’t draw away. You press your teeth to his neck and the steady speed-up of his pulse makes you feel alive.

Maybe he says your name. Maybe he says, “tell me to stop,”. Maybe he says nothing at all. You don’t know. All you know in that moment is a single all-consuming thought. Chris would choose the mission too, over any civilians or innocents. He’d choose the mission.

The sex is savage and violent. It’s take-take on both sides and Chris gives as good as he gets, but he doesn’t draw blood. He’s not that far gone. Under your hand, you can feel the scratches on his back welt up and as his breathing settles you wonder what kind of person could do that: turn sex into a blood sport. You don’t feel regret, not yet. There’s too much adrenaline and dopamine running through your veins for you to feel that but, you are aware in a detached and observational way that you will never do this again.

He lets you lay there on-top of him for longer than he should. His hand resting on the edge of your hip is comforting, warm. Solid. Everything about Chris is solid. He’s grounding. When he thinks you are asleep, he slides you gently off him and makes sure your head is resting on a pillow. He pulls the blankets up around your shoulders before he leaves. After a hundred heartbeats, you hear the shower start. You curl in on yourself.

 

BSAA NA FORWARD OPERATING BASE

Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, United States of America

September 2013

 

21:03

 

September is warm in North Carolina. At the shooting range you empty three clips of 5.56x44mm rounds into the targets and hit your mark in an average hit ratio of 28/30. You volunteer for OPFOR in joint training exercises and take every shot you line up. It feels good to be running through the woods and swamps again. It feels good to be shooting a gun again. With you onboard, OPFOR goes on an unprecedented victory streak. You spar, you shoot, you fight. It feels like one continuous moment. You feel like a grunt again, not at all like the BSAA agent you’ve been. Everything’s boiled down to the physical exhaustion and that moment of sheer combat lucidity.

After five weeks, you realize that HQ hasn’t called you back to London yet. In fact, for five weeks HQ doesn’t hasn’t called you at all.

Chris is in the office that’s been assigned to him, pouring over some documents when you enter. If you were lucid, it’d probably be funny to see how your roles have switched. You in dirtied fatigues, armed to the teeth, and Redfield sitting in the bureaucratic seat.

“You’re babysitting me.”

Chris continues reading whatever stupid files he has on his desk. He barely acknowledges your statement.

“They’ve put me on sabbatical without telling me and sent you of all people to baby-sit me.” Still, no reaction. He looks at you once and then goes back to his papers. It makes you feel so –. So small. This isn’t right, it isn’t supposed to be like this. Redfield is the cocksure, guns blazing captain. He’s the one that charges straight in; 120% heart and anger. You’re the one sitting next to a radio, reciting a map from memory. Calm and in control. Redfield punches walls when he’s angry, you call in the air strike. Redfield jumps feet-first without looking while you hold the fort down. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

You slam your hands down on the table and it feels good to see his pen bounce upon impact. “Chris,” you say and it isn’t a shout but it’s damn near one, “stop fucking around with me.”

He looks up and holds your gaze. It’s steel. Solid as he’s ever been and resolute. “I’ll stop when you stop your self-destructive spree. Ranger. Snap out of it.”

It’s the way that he says _Ranger_ that makes you snap. Not ‘out of it’ as Chris and no doubt the entire BSAA line of command would like, but snap. Just, snap. Completely.

“Yeah?” you sneer and it’s ugly, vicious; the sort of thing that’s meant to hurt. Like a double-edged razor with no grip at all, just one hundred percent fucking blade. “Because god forbid, _I_ go off the rails. You lose a squad and go on a six-month amnesiac bender. I lost two squadrons in Lanshiang Redfield, two-hundred men because you couldn’t stop a missile, and when my partner AWOLed in an active warfront, and my husband fucks off, and two cities get nuked out of existence and Piers is _dead_ and where were you? Did you think the world would stop spinning because you were sad? Grow a pair of eyes Redfield. I had to fucking write the reports after Lanshiang – explain why Alpha team is dead again and lie through my teeth to tell their wives and children that they didn’t die because their captain couldn’t control his own fucking feelings.”

You expect him to stand up and tower over you. To stare down at you and slam you into the fucking desk. Pull rank or something like that and use it to bludgeon you into submission. And you are ready. So, fucking ready. You’re gonna rip his fucking throat out with your teeth. But Chris doesn’t stand. For a moment he stares into your eyes and then he drops his gaze. He puts his knuckles to his forehead and sighs.

“Fuck,” he says and it is resigned and full of self-admonishment. “That’s not-.”

It drains the anger straight out of you, almost like someone had taken a razor blade to your jugular and bled it all out. Your hands are still on his desk, but they’re slack now.

Chris says: “-that’s not what I meant.”

And then he follows that with: “I’m sorry.”

It hits you hard. Harder than it should and it’s slowly dawning on you just how much you’ve said and what you’ve said. How you’ve just thrown nine months of abandonment and hurt straight into his face. Things you thought you had under control. The sort of things that can’t be unsaid. Your hands fall back to your sides and you take a half step back. You’d take another, but Chris is closing his folder and sliding it to you. He taps it twice and looks back at you.

“Take this,” he says because he knows he can’t stop you from running away. “HQ’s had me busy organizing a new unit.”

And then because apparently Redfield is not done dropping bombshells on you today, he says: “I want you to be my XO.”

 

 

BSAA BARRACKS

Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, United States of America

August 2013, one day later

 

23:24

 

Chris sinks down next to you on his sofa.

You stare at your toes. You don’t know what to say to Chris right now. You don’t want to say anything to him at all, not since you ripped open your own bleeding vulnerabilities for him to see.

“You were right,” he says, playing with the tab on his beer. “Reid, Jeff, Marco, even Piers. They died because I couldn’t control my emotions. All fire and no head. That’s why I need you, you’re my counterbalance.”

In any other situation you’d snort. “In case you didn’t notice, I have a temper too.” Redfield knows. He’s been living with it for the past month watching as you oscillate between all the forms of violence that you know – martial, sexual, verbal – and trying to mitigate the damage.

You are still steadfastly not looking at Chris, but you can feel him lean back into the sofa. “Yeah,” he says and you can feel the vibrations of his voice in your back. “But you don’t let it run roughshod over you. Sometimes the anger is just so –.” He stops here. You can hear his fingers clench around the beer can. But Chris continues on. He’s never been the sort to give up, even if it takes him a while to get up again. “I knew it was my fault. If I was just _better_ , they wouldn’t have died. But hating another person was so easy. And she was very easy to hate.”

When you look over at him, he’s staring at the ceiling. It’s dark in Chris’ apartment. You didn’t bother turning the lights on and neither did he. Outside the lights of a vehicle run streaking in as it passes. Chris looks tired. He looks the entirety of his forty years and, wow. It’s been a while. It feels like just yesterday that Racoon had imploded and you’d enlisted in the Army fresh out of high school. It feels like an eternity ago.

How did you get here?

Chris looks over and catches your gaze. You stomp down every instinct you have to run and hold it. He leans over to the coffee table and picks up the folder that’s sat there since you came back.

“I know you don’t forgive me for Edonia. For abandoning you like that. I’m not asking for your forgiveness, but it won’t happen again. I promise.”

Chris is holding the folder out to you as if it’s sliver of forgiveness, of reconciliation and acceptance. As if it’s his way of saying that he’s seen you at your very lowest and he is going to bodily drag you out of that place. That he won’t let you fall there again. When he speaks again, it is quiet, raw with honesty that chafes against your skin. “I trust you. You won’t let me fuck up like that again.”

You take the folder. It feels heavier than sheaves of paper should. “I won’t,” you say and it’s a beginning. It’s a promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a random fact that never made it into the chapter: Ranger's main armament is the FN-SCAR-L which uses the 5.56×45mm NATO cartridge and which is definitely 100% a nod to their mental state/entire personality/this chapter. 
> 
> Weird Military Acronyms:  
> OPFOR - Opposing Forces, the group that gets to play the enemy in field training exercises (FTX).


	4. May 2014, London

SILVER DAGGER OPERATIONAL HEADQUARTERS

[redacted], London, United Kingdom

May 12th 2014

 

18:58

 

Dinner is a cup of stale coffee and half a shitty protein bar you pulled out of the drawer. Contrary to popular belief, this is taking care of yourself because stale, dirt-like coffee reinforces the atmosphere of a paramilitary organization in which all the money goes to expensive things like guns and birds and non-expensive things like bullets which are expensive when you buy them in the quantities a global paramilitary organization might need. And sure, Liesel, the secretary and accountant, had offered to get you take-out but frankly take-out reminds you of Leon and you could do without that thought thank you very much.

Liesel is German and a Major’s daughter, so she does not take offense at this. She doesn’t even give you a half-lidded worried-but-not-worried glance as she leaves. You’re the last person in the office, as usual. Partly because you’re the commander now, and commanders should be the first in and the last out. But also because, and you aren’t afraid to admit this to yourself, you live to work. It’s May; London is still chilly and damp. The radiator is alive and humming behind your desk. You can feel the heat reaching out and wrapping around your ankles. You’re halfway through the protein bar which is waxy and unappealing (but nutritious and fortifying and whatever else drill sergeants tell their boots) when your phone rings. You take one look at the caller-ID, sigh, and put the protein bar down.

“This is my official office line,” you say as way of greeting.

Redfield, who only ever cares about protocol when it involves his fireteam, laughs. You have half the mind to recite back BSAA operational guide 117.83 which details exactly what and why one should do and not do with their personal cells. You know it by heart precisely because you’ve gotten reamed over coals three times for this exact same thing when the BSAA came to audit their new shiny and totally not-secret strike force. Not for the first time, you wish Silver Dagger was secret enough to escape the auditors.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says and is that the sound of a metal detector in the background- “sorry my official phone got blown up in Chicago.” He stretches _official_ in a way that makes it clear what he thinks about BSAA issued equipment. BSAA issued equipment which is coming out of your operational budget and you are so going to sic Liesel on him when she gets in the next morning. She’s German, she’ll have Redfield’s ass for messing with her numbers. You tap you finger against your desk as you allow that thought to quell some of your annoyance.

“Are you in an airport?”

“Catching a ride to Colorado-”

“Colorado is the opposite direction from New York.”

“Yeah,” and you can see Chris running a hand through his hair in the middle of an airport terminal, you can _see_ it, “but there’s something I need in Colorado.”

“What the fuck is there in Colorado that you could possibly need?”

Colorado tends to be a sore subject. It’s Leon’s second-favorite vacation haunt which means 9 out of 10 times when things go to shit and people have to be recalled from vacation, it’s from Colorado. This means whenever you think about that state, you inevitably think about Leon and the way he held his phone and the way his frown spread out from his brows down. For all you know, Leon could be in Colorado right now about to have his vacation ruined-

“Redfield-”

Chris can be accused of many things but being unable to read your moods will never be one of those. He starts speaking very fast, “Sorry Ranger, plane’s leaving. Gotta run, call you back when we’re enroute to New York. Could you get some supplies ready for us, thanks-” and then he hangs up and you let the dial tone ring out for ten full seconds before you put the phone down.

It’s almost seven pm and if you know for a fact that the last trans-Atlantic C130 is flying at 19:43 tonight, sharp. If you ask very nicely and then stare very meanly, maybe the loadmasters will find space for one more HMMWV and whatever else your armorer can prep for immediate shipment across the Atlantic. The ghost of Colorado hoovers besides you and you mentally shove it into a locker. There’s a time and place to angst over your extremely dead marriage but it’s neither now nor here.

 

HUDSON PIER 54

Manhattan, New York City, United States of America

May 12th 2014

 

16:01

 

“Gifts from the BSAA,” Nadia makes a motion as if she isn’t very impressed, “they said that’s the best they can do for us.”

It’s not like they’re getting anything from the DSO, but still Leon wonders what the BSAA thinks they’re going to do with two vehicles and no weapons. “We’re gonna need a lot more than one humvee and a motorcycle to save this city.”

Nadia laughs then, as if this is funny. “Oh no need to worry, XO said there’s ammo in the back.” Damien’s already half-way to the humvee and when he gets there, he pops the trunk. Sure enough, there’s crates of STANAG ammo and two (two!) boxes of grenades just sitting there ready to be used against whatever ugly thing steps into their line of sight.

Leon whistles. When was the last time the DSO issued grenades to its operatives? “Where are you guys getting your requisitions officers?”

Instead of a proud response, or a laugh, or a boast from one of the three BSAA agents, Leon gets a terse statement from none other than Chris Redfield: “We take them from two-timing government agents.”

A pause.

Damien laughs at this as if it’s some intra-agency joke. But Leon stares at Chris and finds him already staring back. Chris has a hard edge in his posture and a sharpness in his unwavering gaze that says he knows exactly what Leon found when he came home from Lanshiang.

Which is to say: exactly jack-squat nothing.

Cleaned out of all the things that they’d shared. The apartment was as sterile and minimalistic as when he’d first moved in. Even her damn toothbrush was gone. And it wasn’t like he didn’t look, but it wasn’t like he looked too hard either. He’d known then and there, standing in the bathroom, what it meant. End of the line. Too much shit for one person to handle, maybe. Sure, she was BSAA and she understood more than a civilian might have, but still. There was a mission after that too, somewhere he needed to be. But he’d come back, and he’d wanted to be at home, pressed against the back of his wife who was warm and solid and _there_. Irrevocably _his_ in the way that nothing else in the world was.

Except when she wasn’t.

And he didn’t know where she’d gone, but now he had a pretty good guess.

“You’d know first-hand, huh?”

Chris grunts in affirmation and tosses him the keys to the Ducati. As far as Leon’s concerned, that’s admission enough.

 

SILVER DAGGER OPERATIONAL HEADQUARTERS

[redacted], London, United Kingdom

May 12th 2014

 

01:22

 

You and Chris have an explicit, if unsaid, understanding when it comes to Silver Dagger’s operations: keep contact minimal while on the mission, try not to skirt outside operational parameters, and deal with the shit that inevitably happens after everyone is back in one piece. Chris does what he needs to do and you’ll deal with the paperwork after. But the most recent dispatch from Delta unit has you punching the Osprey’s direct line and it’s 1 in the morning and you are about to eviscerate someone – which is no idle threat; ages ago, you’d graduated top of the CQC course.

It takes three rings before someone picks up the line, and you’re in full XO chewing-out mode. Chris runs the fireteams, but you run this whole operation which also means the person who is going to have to deal with the fact that the BSAA just decimated seven city blocks in god damn Manhattan is you.

“Redfield, I am going to make what Nadia just did to seven city blocks look like a warm-up when I’m done with you. Fucking –”

But the voice that answers isn’t Chris’. It’s smoother, tired, a little smoky with none of the usual snark. Even across the Atlantic, carried on radio static and with the Osprey’s rotors running in the background, the sound sinks straight to your stomach and stops your heart.

“Hey,” the voice says.

A pause follows, and you feel your name in the emptiness, dangling there like a bomb that might explode. It feels like your breath in your chest. Caught there and suspended, just waiting to see if something will blow up in the seconds between inhale and exhale.

“Leon,” you say and then nothing more. The words had come easily before, huddled in a small briefing room somewhere within the maze of the Pentagon, listening to advisers drone on and on. They’d come easier before, pressed together in a dark room, confessing desires and secret fears. But now you have nothing but questions. Accusations. Everything you think you could say somehow ends up circling back to Ada in your head and well, if that isn’t a message that has already been pounded home already, you don’t know what is.

Six years is a long time to love someone who doesn’t love you back.

Memories and touches and things fill the silence between you. You can feel the bile coating your stomach, thick with anger and hurt and other things inconducive to the matter at hand. It takes all the self-control you have to bodily shove Ada into a mental locker. Hopefully Leon will be gone before she breaks free and maybe he’ll be nice enough to take Ada from your thoughts. You only ever really think about her when Leon’s around anyways. You pull in a breath and force yourself to calm down. “Put Chris on the line,” you say in your best I-am-the-executive-officer voice.

“He’s out like a light right now, want me to wake him?”

And of course, he is. Redfield has a habit of leaving you high and dry. But before you can do something smart – like demand that Nadia be put on the line or just plain hang up, Leon continues on.

“Where’d you get the bike? Didn’t know that the BSAA was burning funds for that kind of ride.”

Your mouth is flat even if he can’t see it. “That was impounded.”

Silence stretches between you two again. Was it always like this? It didn’t feel like this before; Leon always knew what to say and when he didn’t the silence was welcome. Comfortable, even. It hadn’t stretched on like new scar tissue pulling at its seams. You take a breath, inhale, count to five, exhale. Leon used to fill in your silences. He used to always be able to say the right thing. Now there’s just the static and it’s unbearable. “Tell Redfield that if he fucked up the Osprey, I’m gonna have his guts on a silver platter.”

“I will, captain.”

You think there’s affection there packed between his enunciation. The slightly teasing lilt that sounds different from what you’d remembered. It’s something yearning and searching, as if these radio waves can carry his feelings and months of solitude across the Atlantic and into your ear as easily as if he was lying at your neck again, lips half pressed against bare skin.

But this too is an old thought, and really, if there had been affection, it’d been ghosted by Ada. Maybe that’s where he learned it in the first place. How to leave and linger far past the logical and reasonable expiration date.

“Over and out,” you say and hang up.

 _It’s over_ , you tell yourself. _It’s over_. And there’s the answering Polo echoing through your dark apartment and in your chest – _but had it ever started in the first place?_

 

A CERTAIN FLAT

Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom

May 15th 2014

 

21:23

 

There’s someone in your home. You know it before you enter because the door mat is slightly askew as if someone had picked the lock and rushed in without cleaning up after themselves. There’s a shadow sitting at your dining table. It is achingly familiar and infuriatingly so.

There are a dozen reasons for Leon Scott Kennedy to be sitting at your dining table, but you can’t think of a single one that seems plausible.

You turn the lights on and Leon blinks blearily. He looks like shit, like someone’s run him over with a truck and then spat him out again. You blink back. Leon pulls a wad of folded paper from his pocket and you watch him unfold it. There are creases in it, as if it’s been folded and unfolded many times before. He flattens it onto the table with a vehemence and violence that reminds you that despite his extremely unmilitary start, Leon really is the government’s equivalent of a SOF agent.

When you look down at it, the divorce form you’d sent seven months ago stares back at you.

“You never signed it.”

“No,” he says, and he leans back in his chair and you see fifteen years of fighting in the stretch of his leg. He’s not making himself comfortable, he’s getting ready for the fight. You clench and unclench your hands and you know he sees that too even if he keeps his eyes level with yours. “You just up and left. What the fuck was I supposed to think about that? I wanted to talk to you-”

“What do we have to talk about?”

“I- what? Are you serious? Everything?”

You breathe. Inhale, count to five, exhale.

“We don’t have anything to talk about.”

Leon stares, incredulous. You stare at some point beyond his left shoulder. Your hands are clenched. You enunciate your words because this keeps you from spitting in anger. Unbidden, _captain_ comes back to you the same way he’d said it 3 days prior yearning and searching, smoky and affectionate even across the radio. A part of you that is soft for Leon says that he is right; that he’s always been a bit slow in these things and maybe everyone else thought it was obvious that your wife would leave you when you were fucking someone else on the side but maybe Leon didn’t. The part of you that is soft for him says that you should just spell it out. Make it final. Set it in stone. Smack him over the head with the fact of the matter.

But softness is a weakness, and you’re not that person anymore. You’re the XO of Silver Dagger, one of the BSAA’s deadliest and most well-trained weapons and you are a soldier. You’re a soldier in the way that Leon isn’t. Soldiers don’t have soft spots. Soldiers choose the mission over everything else, every time.

You stand unmoving, eyes raised somewhere above Leon’s left shoulder.

“Get out of my house.”

 

 

RENDEVOUZ POINT QUEEN OF HEARTS

Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

November 2011

 

15:07

 

You’re going to die.

 

You’re going to die, and you can’t because Ramirez is waiting for you at the rendezvous point. He’s holding it alone because Cross and Sanders have disappeared into the yawning maw of Balkh. Ramirez needs you; you’re the better shot and the better navigator and you both need out of here right this very moment. But he’s going to die alone because you’re doing to die here, in the place where Cross and Sanders should have been, and your pulse is stuttering, spluttering, half-wild and out of control.

Leon’s waiting in Portugal. He always picks rocky places. You don’t know why; he just always seems to like mountains. Portugal is sunny. It’s warm. You’re bleeding out onto the cold, packed-dirt floor of a half-collapsed house. It must have been a house first, a lifetime ago, before it’d been converted into a BSAA asset. There are experimental vaccines in a steel-clad box in the supply crate complete with neatly labeled vials and an injector. You could drag yourself over to the crate and use it, but it won’t be any help. It’s just a normal bullet – or a collection of bullets, you’re not 100% sure – that’s put you in this sorry state.

You’re going to die here, bleeding out in some middle-of-nowhere backwater province and Ramirez is going to die too because he has no back-up because Cross and Sanders are MIA and this is such a completely shit way to die.

There’s a sharp pain in your thigh, blinding-white and not unlike a knife, but it’s dulled a little. A lot. Probably because you’ve lost too much blood to think straight. Someone’s hand is at your neck and you feel bare skin, two fingers pressed against your pulse, so you know it isn’t Leon or Chris, but still, somehow you think of them in that moment. They’re in Portugal and Russia respectively, a thousand miles away from dusty, cold, beautiful Afghanistan.

Because you’re a soldier, and because you know, despite all your hopes, that this isn’t Leon or Chris or Cross or Sanders or Ramirez, you make a perfunctory attempt at drawing your gun on them. Whoever it is counting your pulse isn’t an ally, so they must be an enemy. It’s pointless of course, because your head is full of cotton and you can’t even get your fingers around the trigger.

You’re going to die, and it won’t even be from a lucky bullet that finally found its mark. There’s an enemy undoing your thigh holsters, rolling up the leg of your pants, untying your boots and you can’t even rally enough strength to shake them off. This is such a shitty way to die. For a moment, they’re looking at you. You see, black and tan and red. Lots of red. Who wears red in the dessert? That’s like painting a bullseye over yourself. You’d stick out like a sore thumb. Sanders had a red scarf. He said it was lucky, from his high school sweetheart or something. Cross always reminded him that that high school sweetheart left him for Jody, but that doesn’t change the luck of it. It was dumb. Sanders is probably dead because of that scarf, and the person is saying something. You can see their lips move but you really can’t hear anything at all beyond the thud of your pulse.

She’s holding something up. It catches the light. Doesn’t look anything like a gun but it glints in the light and then –

A quick pinch in your thigh. You barely feel it. It’s just your pulse slowing, your breathing slowing. You’re slipping into the darkness and you wonder why this woman in red hasn’t put a bullet in your head yet. That’s what you would do if you found an enemy soldier in your condition. That would be the right thing to do. That’s what a soldier would do.

Just before you slip under, you think you hear her speak:

_He was mine before he was your’s. I knew him before you did. Leon-_

You can’t even see her, but her voice is cool like mist settling over mountains and the soothing salt breeze.

 

 

RENDEVOUZ POINT QUEEN OF HEARTS

Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan

November 2011, the next day

 

07:21

 

You wake up.

Your LBV is neatly arranged at your side on top of your folded fatigues. Someone’s bandaged up your torso tightly. Your guns are spread out and all the safeties are locked. Next to your head is a canteen full of lukewarm, metallic water and two codeine pills. You’re alive. Sunlight streams in from a badly shuttered window and outside, the Afghan sky is impossibly blue.

There are no tracks – vehicle or human – around the perimeter. Someone was here, but they’ve left no sign of being there except for cleaning you up and laying all your gear out neatly. You should have died but you didn’t.

When you can move, you tally the supplies because there’s nothing else for you to do while the codeine sets in. There’s the standard Afghanistan BSAA supply crate filled with terrible MRE flavors and quick-clot and ammunition and water tabs and flares. There’s an extra unaccounted-for box of ammo and an ancient, sun weathered porno magazine. It’s dated 1996. You pick it up gingerly and carefully place it back under because even if it’s technically contraband, it’s also a relic from the last war. The last memento of the previous generation of soldiers to fight, kill, and die under the Balkh sun.

It’s only then that you realize the vaccines are gone.

You flip open the steel case and there it is – or isn’t. The injector is there untouched but the row of experimental vaccines, each neatly labeled by some dedicated scientist in a secret base, are missing. Someone’s taken them. The only two people in this place are you and the mysterious benefactor-cum-enemy. You can feel a migraine setting in.

You need to get back to Ramirez, send someone out to find out if Cross and Sanders are dead or alive or swallowed by the fucking desert. You need to get back to a BSAA base right away. With Ramirez, you think, if he’s still alive.

 

A CERTAIN FLAT

Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom

May 15th 2014

 

21:25

 

“I don’t want to fight,” says Leon.

Which is just too bad, because you want to fight. And if he doesn’t leave now, you’re going to start a fight that neither of you can come back from. You’ve got only about five years of accumulated bitterness to spit back in his face and your self-restraint is a rapidly unspooling length of rope.

He runs a hand through his hair. Why do the men in your life always do that when they’re about to say shit you don’t want to hear? You’re staring steadfastly at the point above his left shoulder, hands rolled tight and clenching so your blunt fingernails leave crescents in your skin. Leon opens his mouth and you close your eyes, rigid and ready to hear something that is going to hurt you, something that will rip the scabs off your raw wounds, something that only Leon could say. It would be so much easier if he wasn’t here right now. You can feel your pulse thunder and distantly, the rational part of you asks what it means that Leon triggers your fight or flight response.

Instead, he says, “I lost my whole squad in the Washington metro.”

A blink.

That is not what you expected to come out of his mouth. Leon’s staring at your again and then he stands up and the chair skids on your wooden floor and mentally, you think, you should have taken a step back. But your pride keeps you anchored in there. Leon takes a step forward. Another, and another, until he is standing in front of you.

He’s taller than you. Sometimes you forget this. Everyone looks small next to Redfield and that messes with your sense of perspective. But Leon’s standing in front of you and if he comes any closer, you’ll have to look up to see his eyes. Why haven’t you moved? You could have him pinned to the ground in less than a second, could have had him in a choke-hold, could have snapped his neck.

“I respected that about you,” he says, “your professionalism. How you always put the mission first. Hated that about you too, never understood it.”

Leon doesn’t move a step closer. There is still an arm’s length between you, but you can feel his breath on your skin.

“But now I understand. I wish I didn’t.”

He reaches up and you know that he wants to cup your face, that he’s hurt and he’s flaying his skin open so you can get a look inside. But he stops halfway, like the thought had been cut clean off. His brows crease, uncrease, crease again. His hand falls back to his side. It’s not clenched in a fist. Silence stretches between you again. Finally, Leon looks at you and you wish you couldn’t recognize how raw he is. “I wanted to tell you that,” he says and you wish you didn’t know that was desperation in his voice. “Chris always understood you, I didn’t. Is that why you left?”

Ten months ago, you could have said “well I’ve never fucked Chris!” and it would have been true. It isn’t now, but you don’t throw it at him like a hand grenade. There’s no need to. You can see in his face that Leon already knows.

“No,” you say, and you draw a breath, “no, that’s not why.” And you continue on not because you’ve found it in you to forgive him, but because you understand. You understand exactly what he’s saying and you know what it means and feels to know that your entire team is dead. How it feels to be the only one to walk out of a mission, to scrub your hands over and over again and mentally trace routes in your mind obsessively, chasing the singular path that might have saved someone else.

 

SILVER DAGGER OPERATIONAL HEADQUARTERS

[redacted], London, United Kingdom

May 16th 2014

 

08:06

 

When you get back from the morning briefing, there’s a voice message waiting for you from a caller-ID that you don’t recognize. Normally, this doesn’t happen because your personal line is a closely guarded secret. But you know that Redfield loves sticking his neck in other people’s shit so you have a pretty good idea of who it is.

You open it and the voice that greets you is bright, brimming with sardonic snark and softened with a bit of jetlag. It brings a fond smile to your face unbidden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This takes place before, during, and after the Biohazard: Vendetta movie and I say this because I want all you to know that I emphatically did not put a Ducati motorcycle in this for cool factor. Canon made me.
> 
> Weird Military Acronyms:  
> STANAG - NATO standard ammunition and magazines.


End file.
